Small as an Elephant (11 page)

“No — no, I don’t go to school here. I was just getting out of the rain.”

“Where
do
you go to school, if you don’t go here?”

“I go to school in —” He started to say
Massachusetts
but stopped himself. What if she had seen another news story about the missing boy? What if they had said the boy was from Massachusetts? (He’d already told the librarian as much, he remembered.) “I mean, I used to go to school, but now I’m homeschooled.”

“Then what are you doing here, soaked like a washrag?”

His left hand folded around the little elephant in his pocket. It gave him comfort. It gave him courage. “I returned some supplies we borrowed,” he said, and then, for effect, pointed to his backpack. Wow, he should be a spy or something when he grew up. He was becoming a professional liar.

“Well, you’d better get on home, then. This rain isn’t going to stop anytime soon.” She entered the school.

Jack nodded — though the woman hadn’t even waited for a response — and headed back down the road.

He was pleased to have stumbled upon the perfect excuse for being out of school on a Wednesday. But it didn’t exactly come out of nowhere. When he was nine, his mother was asked to attend a meeting at school — a meeting because the school guidance counselor had concerns. After the meeting, she told Jack she was thinking of yanking him out. “You won’t be homeschooled, Jack. You’ll be unschooled. You’ll learn the ways of the world through experience, without all these silly adults, with their silly rules and their silly concerns, breathing down our necks.”

That was the same month she had just shown up at school three different times and pulled him out for the day. The last time was during morning announcements.

“I hope nothing’s wrong,” his teacher had said.

“Doctor’s appointment,” his mother had replied.

Jack had gathered up his stuff, asked his homeroom teacher (who was also his English teacher) for his homework assignment (knowing he was going to fall further behind), and followed his mother out the door. “But I’m not sick,” he had said.

“I know, honey. It’s a regular checkup. All kids have regular checkups.”

“They do? Why?”

She’d begun talking about vaccinations and how sometimes a little dose of one thing could prevent something worse from happening and how visiting the doctor was like that — you got a little dose of doctoring so that you wouldn’t need a bigger dose of hospitalization later — but it was one of those times when he hadn’t felt smart enough to follow what she was saying, so he’d just buckled up and hoped it didn’t mean he was getting a shot, like the one he had to get when he stepped on a nail at the construction site near Nina’s high-rise. Her mother had insisted.

They’d driven for a long time that day, and Jack had begun thinking that maybe he had some rare disease and had to see a special doctor in a special city, or maybe they were moving again. But no, Mom had pulled into the parking lot of Canobie Lake Park, which had (according to the sign) more than eighty-five rides, games, and attractions.

“Which is going to keep you healthier?” she’d asked. “Someone poking at you with God knows what or a ride on the Corkscrew Coaster?”

Jack still didn’t know if he’d had a doctor’s appointment that day or not. But he did know that the Corkscrew Coaster was undoubtedly the coolest ride he’d ever been on.

After another twenty minutes of trudging through the rain, he arrived at the Lamoine General Store. Not only was his backpack soaked, but so was his sleeping bag inside. It was getting heavier by the minute.

Confident in his new lie about homeschooling, he went inside to dry out. It didn’t occur to him that the store would be so little (only three open aisles, with a lunch counter in the front) and he would be so obvious. He slipped into one of the aisles and pretended to be studying the wide assortment of snack food. Every now and then, he glanced toward the front of the store. Two women in hairnets were working behind the counter. One was making cheesesteak sandwiches on the grill; the other was at the register, cashing out a man who was wearing a T-shirt that read,
The way life should be.
Two men sat at the counter, waiting for their lunch.

“What is it you’re looking for, kid?” asked one of the guys at the counter. The man was about forty, Jack guessed, dressed in grungy, paint-splattered clothes. Even though both his face and his voice were ragged, his eyes were smiling.

“Just looking,” said Jack. He involuntarily shivered as he said this.

“Shouldn’t you be in school?” asked the second guy — a younger guy, maybe the first one’s son — whose clothes were also covered in paint but whose eyes were definitely less kind.

“Homeschooled,” Jack said, trying to muster up some authority in his voice.

The young one snickered and whispered, “Mama’s boy.”

Jack’s face prickled.
Yeah, I’m some mama’s boy. That’s why I’m stranded in Maine, standing here soaked to the bone. I haven’t eaten a full meal in days. I’ve slept on the ground, in a barn, and in a truck.

“So, does being homeschooled make you smarter than the average Lamoine kid?” asked the older guy.

“Ralph,” said one of the women as she flipped the sandwiches onto plates.

“I’m not from Lamoine,” Jack blurted before he could catch himself.

“You don’t say,” said the younger guy, laughing.

“Hey,” said Ralph, reaching for a newspaper next to him on the counter, “are you that kid —?”

Jack didn’t wait to hear what he was going to say. He bolted out of the Lamoine General Store and ran as fast as a kid drenched from head to toe and carrying a heavy backpack could run.

Dang it! Now what was he going to do? He imagined the guys in the store being just interested enough that they’d call the police, tell them they’d seen the kid. Not only would the police know exactly where he was; they’d search harder. How was he going to walk south with the police looking for him?

For the next hour, there were woods on both sides of the road. Jack walked as close to the tree line as he could, ducking into the trees whenever a car approached. Because of the rain, cars had their headlights on, so he could see them approaching — hopefully before they caught sight of him.

At one point he passed a sand pit with rusty metal sculptures lining the road. There were Jesus fish, flat angels with thin lips and triangle noses; cutouts of men and women holding hands, of Jesus touching the finger of a man; and signs that said
LOVE, PEACE,
and
JUSTICE
in giant letters. But there were also several hand-painted signs with runny letters that reminded Jack of blood, signs that read:
NO TRESPASSING: VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED.
He ran on that stretch of road until all the sculptures and all the words felt far behind him.

Finally, this road merged with a busier road, one with fewer trees and more businesses. There were auto-parts stores, paint stores, and shoe stores. Maybe, Jack thought, it was better to be in a crowded place. He wouldn’t call attention to himself.

By this time, his bare legs felt so cold from the constant rain, he could hardly feel them. Except, that is, for the places where his shorts were rubbing against them, making them red and irritated. He’d choose another place to go in and dry off. Someplace that would have lots of people, so that maybe he wouldn’t be noticed. Someplace that didn’t sell newspapers.

Up ahead was a building that looked more like a camp lodge than a store. The sign below the green metal roof read
L.L. BEAN OUTLET
. Framing the door were kayaks that reminded Jack of Life Savers candies, especially the orange-and-yellow-striped ones. “No one goes to Maine without shopping at L.L. Bean,” his mother had said when they were making their list.

Why would everyone want to go to an outdoor-sports store?
he had wondered. Now here he was — only this one didn’t look like the store in the picture his mom had shown him. There was no giant boot out front, either. This must be a baby L.L. Bean.

At the front of the store was a rack of bikes, and some sports accessories like compasses and water bottles, but the rest of the store was a field of clothes — clothes, and tourists carrying canvas shopping bags instead of pushing carts. It wasn’t until Jack had woven his way through the mob (keeping his head down and apologizing over and over for his bulky backpack) that he saw a smattering of camp furniture in the corner. He imagined himself stretching out on the futon and taking a nap.
Yeah, right.
How long would it take for someone to recognize him as the kid on the news?

Jack had learned his lesson. He needed to rest and dry off, but he’d have to remain hidden this time. It didn’t take long to come up with a perfect plan.

He went to a rack of boys’ clothes and grabbed a striped shirt and an L.L. Bean sweatshirt. He hunted for shorts or pants, but they didn’t seem to have any of those today — at least not any where he was standing — so he grabbed a bathing suit instead. Then he went into one of the men’s dressing rooms, where the walls, benches, and doors were pinewood. It was the last dressing room before the handicapped one. He locked the door and slipped out of his wet clothes and into the ones he’d gathered. The shirt was huge, but it didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to take these clothes; he was just going to borrow them for a while. After setting the elephant on the bench, he hung his own clothes up on the metal hooks to dry. Finally, he stretched out on the wooden bench and pulled out his comic books, but the pages were stuck together and ripped at the slightest touch. Practically pulp.

He pulled the big shirt over his still-cold legs. He ate a cereal bar. These bars that the man at the food pantry had picked out were filling, but boy, was he getting sick of this one nutty, raisiny flavor.

Every now and again, someone would knock and he’d say, “I’m in here,” and then they’d pop into another stall. For a long time, he just sat there, listening to the sounds of the voices nearby. Mostly, they were the voices of women telling their husband or their son if something looked right. He smiled as he thought of what his own mother would say about his new outfit. Didn’t matter. He was finally warm.

He kept thinking:
You should go now. It’s time to put on your own clothes and slip out of here,
but he couldn’t force himself to move.

He picked up his elephant and studied her again. She had these cute folds of skin on her breastbone — skin she was meant to grow into, he guessed. He thought he should name her. First, he thought of the obvious names: Ellie, Ella, Dumbo (whoever came up with that name didn’t really know elephants), Horton, Lydia (like the one here in Maine, the one who had started everything with him and his mom).

No, he wouldn’t name her Lydia. He tried to think of other elephant names from real life, from circuses or elephant sanctuaries. He’d only seen one elephant, and he didn’t remember her name. Maybe he’d never known it. Twice, his class had taken a field trip to the zoo, but neither the Stone Zoo nor the Franklin Park Zoo had elephants. For years, he’d begged and begged his mother to take him to the circus whenever it came to Boston, but the one time she bought tickets, she forgot and didn’t come home that night. After that, she began talking about how cruel circuses were to elephants and how she wasn’t going to support them, and how could he, a kid who loved elephants, even think of supporting that sort of thing?

He couldn’t explain it. He could never explain to other kids why elephants mattered so much to him; nor could he explain to his mother how much he just wanted to see one again — to reach out and feel its skin, touch its trunk, look into its big, lonely elephant eyes.

Lots of sites on the Internet — like the ones for elephant orphanages — had live cams of elephants or provided videos. He’d watched two elephants who hadn’t seen each other for years go nuts after meeting again. He’d seen a video of an elephant whose best friend was a stray dog. (“Like you and me,” Nina had said, laughing.) And he’d heard an elephant keeper say that if you blow softly into the trunk of an elephant, it will never forget you.

This was the last thought he had before dozing.

He woke to shouting. Not frantic or angry shouting, but the kind of yelling people do when they’re talking across a distance. It took him a moment to remember where he was, but it didn’t take him long to realize that the shouting was coming from the people who worked at the store and that they were calling out to one another. Closing time.

Dang! Should he change? Maybe he should just grab his own clothes and run — take off before they had a chance to wonder why a kid was hanging out in a dressing room by himself. Or maybe . . .

He gathered his damp clothes in his arms and quietly opened the door, just a crack — just far enough that the stall would appear unoccupied. Then he huddled on the bench in the corner that was blocked by the door.

He could hear footsteps nearby and held his breath: a girl humming, the opening of another dressing-room door.

After what seemed like an eternity, he heard her shout, “All clear!”

The lights went out.

Jack was going to spend the night in the store.